Anna Karenina eBook

“One must know all the facts,” he said
in his thin voice. “A man’s strength
has its limits, countess, and I have reached my limits.
The whole day I have had to be making arrangements,
arrangements about household matters arising”
(he emphasized the word arising) “from
my new, solitary position. The servants, the
governess, the accounts.... These pinpricks have
stabbed me to the heart, and I have not the strength
to bear it. At dinner... yesterday, I was almost
getting up from the dinner table. I could not
bear the way my son looked at me. He did not
ask me the meaning of it all, but he wanted to ask,
and I could not bear the look in his eyes. He
was afraid to look at me, but that is not all....”
Alexey Alexandrovitch would have referred to the
bill that had been brought him, but his voice shook,
and he stopped. That bill on blue paper, for
a hat and ribbons, he could not recall without a rush
of self-pity.

“I understand, dear friend,” said Lidia
Ivanovna. “I understand it all.
Succor and comfort you will find not in me, though
I have come only to aid you if I can. If I could
take from off you all these petty, humiliating cares...I
understand that a woman’s word, a woman’s
superintendence is needed. You will intrust it
to me?”

Silently and gratefully Alexey Alexandrovitch pressed
her hand.

“Together we will take care of Seryozha.
Practical affairs are not my strong point.
But I will set to work. I will be your housekeeper.
Don’t thank me. I do it not from myself...”

“I cannot help thanking you.”

“But, dear friend, do not give way to the feeling
of which you spoke—­being ashamed of what
is the Christian’s highest glory: he
who humbles himself shall be exalted. And
you cannot thank me. You must thank Him, and
pray to Him for succor. In Him alone we find
peace, consolation, salvation, and love,” she
said, and turning her eyes heavenwards, she began
praying, as Alexey Alexandrovitch gathered from her
silence.

Alexey Alexandrovitch listened to her now, and those
expressions which had seemed to him, if not distasteful,
at least exaggerated, now seemed to him natural and
consolatory. Alexey Alexandrovitch had disliked
this new enthusiastic fervor. He was a believer,
who was interested in religion primarily in its political
aspect, and the new doctrine which ventured upon several
new interpretations, just because it paved the way
to discussion and analysis, was in principle disagreeable
to him. He had hitherto taken up a cold and even
antagonistic attitude to this new doctrine, and with
Countess Lidia Ivanovna, who had been carried away
by it, he had never argued, but by silence had assiduously
parried her attempts to provoke him into argument.
Now for the first time he heard her words with pleasure,
and did not inwardly oppose them.

“I am very, very grateful to you, both for your
deeds and for your words,” he said, when she
had finished praying.